Authors:
Historic Era:
Historic Theme:
Subject:
March 1988 | Volume 39, Issue 2
Authors:
Historic Era:
Historic Theme:
Subject:
March 1988 | Volume 39, Issue 2
DeKalb, Illinois, our nearest city, is the site of Northern Illinois University. Some twenty-five thousand young people, mostly urban, from Chicago and environs, make Northern their home. The school publishes a quality daily newspaper called Northern Star. Staff photographers roam the community and fill vacant spots in the paper with artistic shots. Not long ago one such photo ran with the title “Grain Elevator Spanning Northwestern Tracks Clues DeKalb’s Rural Origins.” Actually the photograph showed the abandoned coal chute on the east edge of the city.
The picture brought a flood of memories back to haunt me, along with the realization that a generation had reached maturity since the demise of steam trains, and the youth of today did not recognize the essentials that kept a steam locomotive running.
The concrete monster that is this particular chute straddles the two main tracks of the North Western Railroad. Unused for many years, it still stands because removal would disrupt the busy traffic on the two transcontinental lines that run beneath it. This coal chute entered my life in 1937. It was the Depression. My parents and I had been living on a farm outside DeKalb when it became obvious the landlord would prefer a tenant who could pay rent. This was also the time of the great drought.
With little money and no employment, our next residence was catch-as-catch-can. My father heard of an available house for rent on a street by the railroad, near the coal chute on the east edge of town. The rent was twenty-one dollars a month, and we were happy to get it. I had started high school, and my father and mother both sought work in any form.
For the benefit of a modern generation, I should define the coal chute. Steam locomotives needed water and fuel to make them go. Periodically, along rail lines, wells were sunk and coal-storage facilities erected. The hungry and thirsty locomotives could stop there and replenish.
Our coal chute had been made of wood until it burned down in 1927, when the huge concrete structure now straddling the tracks was erected. It served its last steam engine in 1956, but in its prime thirty or forty trains a day sought service there. It was known as the “family coal chute” because it was operated by a family named Burdick. The father, Frank, started around 1920 and was later joined by his sons, Ted and Roy. Each worked eight hours a day, seven days a week from 1933 on.
When a train was ready to receive its coal, a giant empty bucket would travel down from the chute to pick up an eighteen-thousand-pound load of coal. This was hoisted back up to the bin, and the train took its position under the chute. The coal was then dumped into the tender.
Passenger trains were light enough to jockey into place beneath the chute by moving the